ello, jello

I’ve got things to say, things she’s not picking up

And yesterday I started the unraveling

I said a while ago that I didn’t care that her hair was falling out, but that’s not the truth. Of course I care. I care even though today she is beautiful and cruel and cold. She obsesses over her appearance and is not at all the same person from 15 years ago and I don’t understand why. Because I am still the same person who ran away with her when I was seven and she was eight. We snipped the shrubbery on the corner of my suburban street with my dad’s kitchen shears and made a nest inside its prickly branches. We furnished our new house with my twin comforter, two couch pillows and mom’s wireless telephone. We wrote my parents a letter saying we were leaving, and lived in our new house for an afternoon. (I was sad that nobody called us. Our cordless landline couldn’t reach that far down the street). Our summers were imagination-filled before she turned to boys and drugs and parties. Before her parents divorced and she got a DUI. Before she overdosed and paramedics found her passed out in a club bathroom. Before she stopped coming to family gatherings and started picking apart our other sister. Before she made her online image her entire world. Before her hair started falling out.

I sometimes talk to that 7-year old version of me. The HOA has cut back the shrubs on that street corner, so much so that tunnels today would be impossible to build. But maybe that’s just what they want us to think. I let my younger self dream. Maybe that’s where my sister has been this entire time. Maybe she stayed in the house we made there. I’ve always wondered where loose strands of hair go. I taught her how to finger weave back then, maybe she built a cocoon out of her own hair to protect against the thorns and never left. My parents disconnected their landline a decade ago, but I wonder. If I called that old number, would she pick up?